Abstract: In this paper we present an approach to study the radiative decay modes of the J/psi into a photon and one of the tensor mesons f (2)(1270) , f' (2)(1525) , as well as the scalar ones f (0)(1370) and f (0)(1710) . Especially, we compare predictions that emerge from a scheme where the states appear dynamically in the solution of vector meson-vector meson scattering amplitudes to those from a (admittedly naive) quark model. We provide evidence that it might be possible to distinguish amongst the two scenarios, once improved data are available.